The Barker Street Regulars

there, and Althea had had a fine time instructing me about engineers’ thumbs, devils’ feet, Sussex vampires, and miscellaneous other bits of Sherlockian trivia. In an oblique and tactful way, I’d tried to satisfy my curiosity about whether Hugh or Robert had ever been the man in her life, as she was the woman in theirs, and if so, which one,
    Hugh or Robert, but I got nowhere, mainly because such bothersome impediments as discretion and good taste held me back from suggesting that the late Mr. Battlefield, whoever he’d been, had been other than the man. All I learned about Mr. Battlefield was that Althea had married him just after she’d graduated from Radcliffe and that he’d soon died of meningitis. Althea had then begun her career as an English teacher at the Avon Hill School, where she’d continued to teach even after boys had been admitted and from which she’d retired twenty-five years ago. Robert and Hugh, she told me, were fellow members of the Red-headed League of Boston, not to be confused with any of the other Red-headed Leagues in other cities or any of the three other Sherlockian organizations in Greater Boston, and certainly not to be confused with the Baker Street Irregulars. The B.S.I., I learned, was the elite, by-invitation-only society to which Althea and Robert belonged and Hugh did not. She herself was a recent inductee—the B.S.I. had been closed to women until 1991—but Hugh had been eligible for eons, and was sensitive about his exclusion.
    “Politics!” Althea exclaimed.
    “It’s the same way in dogs,” I told her.
    “It’s the same way everywhere,” Althea said. “And what does a title mean, after all?”
    “Nothing,” said I, stroking the head of my Ch., C.D.X., C.G.C., T.T., soon-to-be Rx.D. companion. That’s breed champion, Companion Dog Excellent, Canine Good Citizen, Temperament Tested, soon-to-be Therapy Dog, who’d also have titles from Canada, Bermuda, and elsewhere if I could afford to travel. “But what do, uh, titles...?”
    “B.S.I.,” Althea replied. “I am a B.S.I. Robert is a
    B.S.I. Hugh is not.” I assumed that he’d flunked a trivia test by misquoting the Canon, but to my surprise, Althea said, “And all because Hugh is an Oxford man.”
    As it turned out, Althea didn’t mean that Hugh had gone to Oxford. As I’ve said, he went to M.I.T. Rather, one of the classic Problems in Sherlockian scholarship, as Althea explained to me, was a controversy about whether Sherlock Holmes’s time at university, as she phrased it, had been spent at Oxford or Cambridge. Hugh’s allegiance to the Oxford side of the debate was, in itself, perfectly respectable; the topic was one on which aficionados agreed to disagree. As quite a young man, Hugh, however, in a burst of excess loyalty to the Oxford side, had created a violent scene that culminated when, in the midst of a big convention of fellow Holmesians, he had punched an argumentative Cantabrigian in the jaw and sent the poor man to the hospital. The bystanders, I suspected, had been outraged at the crassly non-Sherlockian method of attack. It seemed to me that if Hugh had had the sense to whack his foe with the Master’s favorite weapon, a loaded hunting crop, he’d be a B.S.I. today.
    Anyway, after making our regular Friday visit, Rowdy and I returned only two days later not only because the more we visited, the sooner he got his title, but because... Well, I’m sure there was some less frivolous, preferably more altruistic, reason. Oh, yes. Except that it wasn’t exactly altruistic. I’ll have to leap ahead again here, but bear with me, because the whole business about Steve Delaney, and Gloria and Scott, honestly does have to do with the story. Steve Delaney, as I’ve mentioned in passing, is my lover and Rowdy and Kimi’s vet, not that I get a substantial discount, in case you wondered, but he’s both, although for entirely separate reasons. Until recently, I’d had no cause at all for complaint about him in either capacity, meaning that if it hadn’t been for the stink Gloria and Scott were kicking up, Steve and I would have spent a torrid late-winter afternoon in bed, and then I’d have talked him into making himself professionally useful by squirting Intratrak II up the dogs’ noses or at least trimming their nails. Even now, on the Sunday when I met Ceci, I still thought Steve was the best vet I’d ever used, and I knew that if a veterinary crisis befell Rowdy or Kimi, he’d